unncessary annoyances

John Gruber had a nice post a couple of weeks back about how the iPhone's version of Safari simply dispenses with showing the HTTP prefix to URLs, presumably in order to save space on a very small screen. Which makes me think: why have we been looking at HTTP:// and HTTPS:// all these years? Damn, those are ugly. And totally unnecessary (especially since most browsers have other ways to alert us to secure pages than the S at the end of HTTPS). The URL fields of our browsers, which most of us spend a lot of time looking at, still retain way too many unnecessary annoyances. Firefox has at least figured out that if I accidentally type out a comma in google,com I meant to type a period — but if I type in culture11,com its Awesome Bar, being rather less than Awesome in such circumstances, sends me to the Google search page, which asks me if I meant to type in culture11.com. Meanwhile, Safari professes in all such circumstances to have no idea what I want from it. Surely it's past time for browsers to get a little smarter with exceedingly minor typos. And with that mini-rant I'll be signing for a couple of days — I'm off to Noo Yawk City for some very full days of meetings with my dear friends in the Project on Lived Theology. Be back soon!